Friday, June 28, 2013

‘Sweetgrass’ drifts so far from the expected narrative
or expositional tenets of the documentary format that it’s possible to forget
you are actually watching a documentary and feel that, instead, you’re immersed
in some kind of Tarkovskian art movie or film-poem.

‘Sweetgrass’ exists without narration or “talking
heads” interview footage. For the first half hour at least, before a group of
unnamed ranchers drive a sizeable herd of sheep through Montana’s Beartooth
Mountains in search of pasture, barely a word is spoken. For the first half
hour, the focus is entirely on the sheep. The ranchers float around on the
periphery, but say barely anything. The camera insinuates itself amongst the
herd and it seems for a while as if film-makers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and
Ilisa Barbash are going to remain with the sheep’s POV for the duration – a prospect
nowhere near as unappealing as it may sound.

Incidentally: the use of “filmmakers” in that last
sentence. ‘Sweetgrass’ bears no director’s credit. It was produced by Barbash
and “recorded” by Castaing-Taylor. The credits are as spare as anything else in
the film, and it’s immediately apparent that’s exactly what Castaing-Taylor
did: let he his camera record what was happening.

Ah, but there’s the rub. ‘Sweetgrass’ was shot between
2001 and 2003 (it wasn’t released till 2009) and two years’ worth of footage,
even if collected intermittently, still leaves the editor with subjective
choices in terms of sculpting a 105-minute feature which, notwithstanding its
jettisoning of conventional narrative techniques, still needs a rhythm, a flow
and an overarching structure. To put it another way: language is the least of Castaing-Taylor
and Barbash’s concerns, but grammar still applies – the grammar of cinema. And
every cut, as Truffaut pointed out … well, you know the rest. There’s also an
eminently sneaky non-naturalistic moment involving the overdubbing of an
extreme long shot with soundtrack that seems like it might have been “lifted”
from elsewhere during the two-years Castaing-Taylor recorded the work of the
ranchers.

It’s a measure of how successful ‘Sweetgrass’ is,
however, that these considerations didn’t come to mind until way after those
stripped-down end credits had taken up their minute and a half of screen time
(if that) and this exhausted viewer was giving thanks that he doesn’t have to
herd sheep for a living. Granted, there seemed to be a total dearth of the kind
of office politics, lying, backstabbing, and rampant careerist arrogance that
makes my place of work such a Machiavellian shithole, but at least I don’t have
to deal with grizzly bears, dead sheep, vertiginous mountainsides, adverse
weather conditions, 18-hour days, amenities that redefine basic, and loneliness
that must seem all the more crushing for the grandeur of the mountains and the
endless emptiness of the landscape.

Maybe it’s the loneliness that informs the scene I
mentioned earlier; maybe all of the above. Over a shot that reveals itself as
ever more magisterial the further the camera pulls back, the sheep diminished
to almost unidentifiable white dots making a slow progress, en masse, up a
steep gradient in the kind of landscape that inspires epithets like “wilderness
country”, the ranch boss lets forth with an expletive-peppered rant against the
sheep, his dogs and probably every single thing under the sun, using the word “fuck”
so many times in just a couple of minutes that a mash-up of ‘Casino’, ‘The
Boondock Saints’ and ‘In Bruges’ would have a hard time staying the course.

It’s a curious moment – it rams home the thanklessness
of the work and the wearying reality of the conditions, but it also feels out
of place in a film where there has been no music, no narration, and the sound
design up to this point has been rigorously diegetic. But, as entered into
evidence earlier in this review, this didn’t occur to me until afterwards. So
maybe the proof is in whether an aesthetic decision intrudes enough to throw you
out of the film while you’re watching
it. Besides, the doctrine of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” – an intellectually and
aesthetically valid option for the serious documentarist – can be said to
apply.

‘Sweetgrass’, ultimately, is an elegy for a way of
life. The film is offered in memoriam
the very ranch it depicts: it ceased to be a going concern in 2004, just over a
century after it was established. It depicts a way of life that was probably
outdated several decades ago. There’s a scene of the ranch boss – a man of few
words (when he’s not cussing, that is) and a chronic mumbler almost to the point
of incoherence – is having a faltering conversation over a walky-talky. Between
his linguistic deficiencies and a continual wash of static, it adds up to an awkward
juxtaposition of the traditional and the contemporary. Remember Kirk Douglas
riding across the scrubland in full cowboy gear in ‘Lonely are the Brave’, only
to pull up his horse at the edge of a multi-lane freeway, huge Mack trucks
thundering past? ‘Sweetgrass’ gives you that feeling for an hour and three
quarters.

Friday, June 21, 2013

“Dear God, I have a lot on my plate at the moment: last week I had sex for the first time, my sister is slowly dying, and my mom – as I’m sure you know – is a total bitch.”
Thus the prayer of sulky and socially inept teenager Pauline (Annalynne McCord). Prior to ‘Excision’, I was dimly aware that McCord was hugely popular in fuck-awful TV shows like ‘Nip, Tuck’ and the ‘90210’ reboot (and just typing “ ‘90201’ reboot” made me a little bit sick in my mouth). Post ‘Excision’, I have nothing but respect for the lady.

The objects of Pauline’s empathy and ire are, respectively, Grace (Ariel Winter) who is suffering from cystic fibrosis, and Phyllis (Traci Lords) who is suffering from being a stuck-up control freak suburbanite mom. Prior to ‘Excision’, I was dimly aware that Winter had done a hell of a lot of TV roles and been in ‘One Missed Call’, and was very significantly aware that Lords had a background in adult entertainment not to mention a shedload of equally exploitative B-movie roles. Both were infinitely better in this than I had any reason to expect.

In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that – with the exception of its somewhat abrupt ending – ‘Excision’ is one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in ages, and one of the best comedies. Note, I keep the categories separate. ‘Excision’ doesn’t slot into the comedy/horror subcategory as easily as, say, ‘Tremors’, ‘Slither’ or ‘Dale and Tucker vs Evil’. The comedic elements – and don’t let that trite little turn of phrase undersell it: this film is funny as fuck – are redolent of ‘Heathers’ or a nastier, less day-glo version of ‘Mean Girls’, while the horror tropes bring to mind the body horror of early Cronenberg infused with the in-yer-face grotesquery of Takeshi Miike or Kim Ki-Duk.

The set-up is basically an extrapolation of the interrelationships mentioned above. Pauline’s all-consuming love for her sister is the one constant by which she offsets being high school pariah, piggy-in-the-middle during her parents’ arguments, a lank-haired virgin, and dealing with an almost constant onslaught of cold sores which she blames on her father. His sin? Giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after a swimming pool accident when she was younger. Pauline, in short has issues, and the film opens with the sublimation of her various psychological quirks into the dream state. It’s the first many dream sequences that punctuate the narrative, and they provide ‘Excision’ with most of its deliriously twisted iconography: dream sequences predicated on sexual imagery and clinical white backgrounds that generally don’t stay clinically white for very long. There’s also a lot of blood in Pauline’s dreams. Gallons of it.

But she’s not the kind of lass to dream her life away, is our Pauline. She quickly sets about resolving her issues. The virginity problem? Oh, look – there’s a football jock with an ice queen girlfriend who isn’t satiating his needs. Problem solved! (The payoff to this scene, channelling the imagery of Pauline’s dreams, will probably leave you feeling a little queasy.) The mom problem? A quick word with God: “Kill my mother. Kill her. You’ll probably want to make it painless. I get it – that’s your thing – but hear me out: a little pain never hurt anyone. And besides, you can always just blame it on the devil.” (Okay, jury’s still out on the efficacy of this method). Imminent death of beloved sister? Study to become a surgeon. Which is where Pauline encounters a couple of barriers: (i) timeframe, (ii) she’s a really crap student.

Can anyone guess where writer/director Richard Bates Jr is going with this? (And while you’re all jotting your answers on a postcard, let me take a moment to marvel at the serendipity of this fucked up little movie being directed by someone called Bates. Sometimes life is just priceless.)

‘Excision’ sets out its stall with such razor sharp efficiency (it clocks in at 81 minutes, five of which are the end credits) and sets up its denouement with such black-hearted delight that there are no real surprises on offer … except to wonder, as the sick jokes keep coming and McCord’s performance drills deeper and deeper into Pauline’s love-lacerated soul, just how far Bates and his anti-heroine can push things. And how they can possibly maintain the gallows humour.

The answer – without giving anything away – is that they know exactly when to cut off the laughing gas. ‘Excision’ is a body horror film with a surgery-obsessed protagonist. To use the obvious metaphor, once it’s finished operating on you, it doesn’t allow a gradual drifting awake in a recovery ward followed by a full clinical review before the ambulance carefully drives you home avoiding the potholes and speed bumps. No, siree. It stitches you up, tosses you back on the gurney like a sack of potatoes and sends you hurtling down the corridor, bashing through a fire door and out of the hospital, screaming.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Cineworld held a mystery film screening this evening,
whipping up publicity by posting a series of downright oblique clues via
Twitter. Messageboards were abuzz with speculation: many thought ‘Pacific Rim’,
others plumbed for ‘The Lone Ranger’; when we booked the tickets, my wife was
holding out for ‘The Wolverine’ while I had my fingers crossed for ‘The World’s
End’. Ultimately, we were both disappointed. But at least it wasn’t two hours
of CGI robots twatting aliens and then twatting each other. As we queued –
interminably – I put a comment on FB to the effect that if it was ‘Pacific Rim’,
I was going home.

We ended up not going home … well, not till the movie
was over. We’d already agreed on the Half Hour Rule (if neither of us are
digging a film at the half hour, we cut our losses and blow the joint). By
minute thirty of ‘Now You See Me’, we were both enjoying it. By the time it was
over, though, we had mixed feelings.

‘Now You See Me’ does several things right in very
quick succession. It starts with a voiceover warning the audience that the
closer they look, they less likely they’ll be to spot the trick. At the same
time, a simple card trick plays out. The camera forces a very specific card on
the viewer. It’s kind of a flipside to the opening of ‘The Prestige’. Where
Christopher Nolan’s film clues you in to the three stages of an illusion, ‘Now
You See Me’ deliberately sets out to obfuscate. It’s both a ballsy stroke of legerdemain
and a self-defeating act: the longer ‘Now You See Me’ goes on, the more evident
it is that director Louis Letterier wants his film to be a ‘Prestige’ for the
Jerry Bruckheimer generation. But whereas ‘The Prestige’ has a genuine weighty
human drama to anchor its more fanciful elements, ‘Now You See Me’ trades
solely in the fanciful.

But let’s skip back to its opening reel. Having pulled
a beautifully executed fast one on the audience, Letterier assembles his
quartet of prestidigitatorial protagonists with superb economy, dealing out
their vignettes like cards: street magician with a tendency to the theatrical J
Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist/shakedown artist Merritt McKinney
(Woody Harrelson), glamorous escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and new
kid on the block Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). The narrative flings them together
and has them pulled into the scheme of an unknown benefactor so quickly – the title
card is a perfectly-timed punchline to the whole sequence – that their
ineffably stupid names didn’t even begin to annoy me till a good halfway into
the movie.

In equally quick succession, our foursome have been
reimagined as a sell-out Vegas act who make headlines (and get themselves
arrested) on account of an illusion based around a bank robbery. What pisses
off the authorities, and gets Interpol newbie Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent)
assigned to assisting rumpled sourpuss detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) –
this really is That Movie Where Really Talented People Play Really
One-Dimension Characters With Really Stupid Names – is the disappearance of a
fuckton of Euros from a Parisian bank that tallies exactly with the magic
trick.

The rest of the movie – or at least, the 75% of it
that conspires to make you take your eye off the ball prior to the big reveal –
is essentially Dylan and Alma vs. The Four Horsemen (thus the collective name
the illusionists bill themselves as, notwithstanding that one of them is a
woman), while vengeful impresario Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) hover in the wings nursing their own agendas.

‘Now You See Me’ is magnificently entertaining for a
big chunk of its running time. Less than an hour in, I decided not to bother
trying to second guess and just enjoy the ride. I’m glad I took that approach,
because the whole improbably contrived plot pays off in a manner that, while
not disappointing or in any way a cheat, is a little underwhelming. The essential
problem with making a film about magic is that magic is a con. It’s smoke and
mirrors; razzle dazzle; misdirection. It’s all surface and when you think about
it too much, you dismiss it – rightly – as bullshit. ‘The Prestige’ is only superficially
about magic – the real point of the film is the cost of the illusion; what you have to sacrifice to accomplish the
seemingly impossible. To a lesser degree, Neil Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ sets
out its box of tricks as a backdrop to a tale of romance. ‘Now You See Me’ is
entirely about the illusion, and as such starts to vaporise in a fog of its own
insubstantiality the moment the end credits roll.

Notwithstanding that ‘The Iceman’ is an infinitely
better crafted film than ‘Primal Fear’, much of it has the tang of the perfunctory
while director Ariel Vromen never fully succeeds
in engaging with the story’s key dynamic. Based on the true story (and if those
words at the start of a movie don’t sound an alarm bell, then you’re probably a
lot less jaded a film-goer than I) of hitman Richard Kuklinski, the story
starts in 1964 with the inexpressive Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) having coffee
with naïve girl-next-door Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder, so not getting away
with playing a twenty-something in these early scenes). Later, at a pool game,
an acquaintance refuses to pay Kuklinski off over a bet then compounds the
offence by making ugly remarks about Deborah. For which he ends up with his
throat cut in an alleyway. Shannon plays this pivotal moment to perfection:
there’s a moment when he genuinely convinces you – never mind that you’ve just
shelled out for a ticket to see him playing one of the most notorious contract
killers of his time – that Kuklinski might just let it go and walk away. And
when he does walk away, albeit after
effecting a straight-razor/jugular interface, the sense of dispassion is
shattering. It’s one of a handful of moments where Vromen absolutely nails the
tone he’s looking for. He’s not quite so successful elsewhere, though.

Jump forward a couple of years – the first of numerous
and often inelegant lurches through a two-decade timeline – and Kuklinski and
Deborah are married, with a baby daughter and looking to better themselves.
Kuklinski’s working on the periphery of the criminal underworld, cutting film
and delivering prints for a low-rent pornographer. A disagreement over a delivery
date spins him into the orbit of mob boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta). Impressed by
how little fear/emotion/give-a-shitness Kuklinski evinces in the face of his
goons, Demeo hires him on the understanding that he works for no-one else.
Kuklinski takes to the work like a duck to the proverbial. He doesn’t seem to
relish killing, but it doesn’t bother him either. It’s just something that he
happens to be very good act. Dude loves his family – “You and the girls,” he
tells Deborah during the closest he comes to an emotionally-charged scene, “are
the only thing I care about in this world” – but as far as the rest of humanity
is concerned, he’s utterly cold. Ergo, the iceman.

After a brutally effective Kuklinski-straight-up-kills-a-fuckton-of-people
montage, Vromen gets bogged down in the minutiae of underworld politics, mob
hierarchy paranoia, rivalry, betrayal and bad decisions. It’s the kind of
milieu that Scorsese or Coppola would sail through, sketching out the
interrelationships and knife-edge tensions in a scintillating whirl of
exposition of set-piece. Vromen isn’t quite in their league and there’s a
palpable sense, as events snowball in the largely 70s-set mid-section, of the
script stumbling and gasping for breath as it tries to keep up with everything.
By now, Demeo’s fuck-up of a right hand man Josh Rosenthal (an almost
unrecognisable David Schwimmer) has incurred the ire of another outfit whose consigliore Leonard Marks (Robert Davi)
is putting pressure on Demeo to cut the kid loose (in the terminal sense of the
word); Demeo’s pissed off at Kuklinski for not killing a witness (a 17 year old
girl – his daughters are by now teenagers themselves); and Kuklinski,
essentially unemployed, has teamed up with ice-cream van driving hippie assassin
Mr Freezy (an equally unrecognisable Chris Evans) to pull in enough money to
keep his family in the style to which they have become accustomed. Oh, and
there’s also some business about Kuklinski’s nutcase brother Joey (Stephen
Dorff), in prison for killing a young girl.

Buried in all of this is the film that the tagline on
the poster – “loving husband, devoted father, ruthless killer” – hints at.
Because here’s the fascinating thing: when the Feds arrested him after an
undercover agent netted him in a classic bit of entrapment, his family genuinely
had no idea that he was a mob-employed enforcer who had killed over 100 people.
No idea. And if the mechanics of how an essentially amoral hitman not only kept
work and home life separate but maintained a façade of domestic normality for
two decades isn’t a great concept for a movie then I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, Vromen is too busy leaping through the
chronology (not that the film even considers the real Kuklinski’s already
notable criminal activities during the 50s and his association with the
DeCavalcante crime family that pre-dated his involvement with Demeo) to focus
on this aspect. The script throws out a few lines about Deborah thinking that
he works in investment banking, and the whole family man persona is dramatised
by means of his daughters hero-worshipping him (why they venerate him is never contextualised).

So why – with the mission statement of this blog being
the love, not the criticism, of film – am I spewing 1,000 words on ‘The Iceman’?
Three reasons, really. Firstly, its emulation of slow-burn 70s filmmaking is a
welcome respite from the flashy tentpole nonsense that has dominated the
screens of my local multiplex recently. Secondly, it looks great: akin to Roger
Donaldson’s ‘The Bank Job’ and Tomas Alfredson’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’,
it’s a film predominantly set in the 70s that both looks and feels like it was made in the 70s. Thirdly, the
performances. There’s an entire cluster of great performances, with Shannon’s
towering slab of subdued greatness at the centre. Liotta, in a career based on
casting directors exploiting his iconic role in ‘Goodfellas’, is as engaged as
I’ve seen him since that movie. Sure, he’s doing the same old gimlet-eyed
Liotta shtick, but here it seems authentically dangerous. Davi does his best
work for a couple of decades, and Schwimmer and Evans physically lose
themselves in their characters in a way I would never have anticipated from
either of them.

Above all, though,
there’s Michael Shannon. A man without a bad turn on his CV. Who spectacularly
graduates from character actor to compelling and commanding lead. The film
itself might struggle to achieve bronze on the podium, but Shannon takes the
gold.

Monday, June 03, 2013

On the bus home from the cinema earlier this evening,
I shared this little nugget on
Facebook:

“Populaire: enjoyably
cheesy feel good typewriter porn. And that’s not a sentence I envisaged writing
when I got up this morning!”

The above functions as a reasonable enough capsule
review. Here’s the more considered version:

Populaire is the kind of film that,
if I got made in Hollywood – okay, so a Hollywood studio greenlighting a romcom
set in the high-stakes world of typing competitions is a tad unlikely, but bear
with me here – would star Katherine Heigl as the ditzy but gorgeous typist and
Gerard Butler as the smarmy failed-athlete-turned-businessman who sees her as a
ticket to exonerating his lack of competitive edge way back when. There would
be training montages, awkward banter that pirouettes gradually into the
suggestive, and an all-or-nothing finale on the eve of the world championship
competition. All of which, to be fair, can be found in the non-Hollywood Populaire that exists here in the real
world, directed by Regis Roinsard and starring Deborah Francois and Romain Duris.
The difference is that Hollywood would meld this material into a tame romantic
comedy with no real stakes and the typing just a quirky backdrop to the
boy-meets-girl predictability.

Populaire takes its typing seriously.
The various tournaments Rose (Francois) competes in are depicted either as
endurance tests (one in particular comes across as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with typewriters instead of dancing)
or outright duels. At one point, Roinsard whips the camera back and forth
between the blurred fingers of two finalists, the motion suggesting a tennis
match.

Nor are the romcom elements necessarily tame, no
matter how much the swirling, pastel-coloured stylisations of the first half might
conspire to kid you otherwise. The sexual tension between Rose and the sullen,
driven Louis (Duris) resolves in what the BBFC guidance text calls “one
moderate sex scene”, as a prelude to which the protagonists have a toe-to-toe
argument and treat each other to a good hard slap before they get en sac.

This is a good place to consider Populaire’s unreconstructed worldview, and to make a tip of the hat
to Roinsard for utterly nailing the aesthetic. The film is set in 1959 – it has
to be, given the subject matter and the development in typewriter technology
that it pays off with – and it both looks and feels like it. There’s a casual
sexism that was pretty much the norm in cinema (and literature … and, hell, in
society itself) in the 50s and 60s. It’s there in the parade of wannabe
secretaries vying for a job with Louis. It’s there in the man-hungry vamp who
practically throws herself at a coolly unresponsive Louis in a bar. It’s there
in the sneering, leering mambo singer who practically oozes his performance at
a smoky club.

Fortunately, all of this is balanced by the sheer irresistibility
of Francois’s performance. (The most likeable heroine French cinema has given
us since Amelie Poulain? I’m calling it!) It’s balanced by a cluster of
hilarious moments, from an impromptu dance sequence to Rose’s colour coded nail
varnish, an aid to touch typing.

Narratively, Populaire
offers no surprises. It reminded me of Papadopoulos
and Sons in its use of tried-and-trusted plot points: with the story taking
care of itself, the script is free to investigate the oddball psychological
struggle between Louis’s need to compete and his fear of fulfilment, as well as
the familial underpinnings to Rose’s inveterate clumsiness and lack of
confidence. The baby boom materialism of the late 50s – highlighted by the
presence of expatriate American Bob (Shaun Benson) as Louis’s rival-cum-friend –
makes for an effective counterpoint to the human story.

Populaire isn’t perfect – Louis’s
recollections of his wartime past as a member of the Resistance freight the
script with something entirely at odds with everything else in the film, and
there’s some cringeworthy national stereotyping going on in the world championship
sequence – but it makes for an entirely entertaining and just-quirky-enough two
hours at the cinema, its ostensible superficialities masking a well-crafted
grown-up piece of filmmaking. An excellent choice for the discerning populist.